It’s almost time for the annual Fall sun outages affecting satellite reception. Beginning on October 4th and occurring periodically until October 10th in our area, there will be brief outages of various channels fed via satellite, lasting approximately 10 minutes at a time. This will also affect our off air channels in some instances because the broadcasters receiver their programming via satellite as well in most cases. The affected channels will start out with brief pixelating and then proceed to blocking up and going completely off for a few minutes as the satellite moves through its arc where it is directly between us and the sun but will clear up within 5 to 10 minutes. We use multiple satellites so not all channels will be affected at the same exact time.
As the sun’s path across the sky becomes lower each day, there are times when it is in a direct line behind a communication satellite that is sending signals to a receiving satellite antenna here on earth. When the antenna is looking into the sun, the interference from the sun overrides the signals from the satellite. Then a sun outage occurs. This occurs every Spring and Summer over a period of a week to 10 days.